Richland's Clean-Up Prayers Are Answered, But You-Know-Who Objects

The Free Press    March 11, 2004

After all these years, it's hard to decide which is more unbelievable: That Richland has finally found an angel willing to clean up the worst nightmare in the township, or that the Richland Citizens Alliance - the Mob - is raising hell over it.

Maybe you've driven past the old brickyard on Heller Road. It used to be an exciting, thriving business. Hot kilns, hundreds of busy workers, stacks of cooling red bricks. The clay was mined right from the ground, creating "borrow pits". These pits quickly filled with water, and the company had to constantly pump them out to continue the mining. Eventually they grew to become lakes, the largest in the area before Nockamixon.

Kids used to ride bikes there, and dig for mussels. Quakertown Brick was nationally renown, and the construction material of choice for many of the houses in this area before the plant closed in the late 1970's. And that's when the disasters began.

Abandoned buildings and isolated, unmaintained fields were magnets for just about anything that can happen in society out of the public sight. And worse.

Arsonists burned down the structures. But not to the ground. Enough was left to conceal drug users, runaways, and the usual byproducts of unrestricted gatherings. It was not a family destination, though some families no doubt were conceived there. Sadly, at least one also ended, as a reported suicide.

The occasional users were eventually replaced by more frequent, and more dangerous visitors - the midnight dumpers. Some were locals just looking to discard an old refrigerator or sofa. Some were waste haulers, who charged their customers to take trash to landfills (where they would have to pay "tipping fees"), but instead deposited the junk in the convenient Heller Road fields. Some were small contractors, people you know, who are always looking for a place to get rid of their construction debris.

And the worst of all were the tire dumpers. Not just a guy with an old flat or two, but large companies, with tractor-trailer loads of useless, large, heavy rubber circles that many landfills wouldn't accept. Tires don't biodegrade. You can't legally burn them. They take up lots of room. And they are the perfect breeding ground for everything you don't want.

Richland had no police force. The old brickyard had no neighbors. The only thing missing was a neon sign that said "Dump Tires Here". And they did. By the hundreds of thousands. Tires from Philadelphia, Allentown, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware. The Quakertown Brickyard was famous again, but this new attraction wasn't in the AAA travel guides.

It doesn't take much imagination to picture what came next. In February, 1998, arsonists gave us an upclose-and-personal look at, and whiff of, a tire roast. Acres of them, smoldering hot, and billowing choking smoke, with a smell like, well, burning rubber. It took weeks to extinguish the blazes, and almost a year before the surviving tires were all carted away, under DEP supervision. An environmental mess.

End of problems? Of course not. We went right back to the way things were before the tires - a hangout by night, and an ATV course by day. Whatever environmental areas survived the tires and fires have been devastated by the ATV's field-beatin'.

The company with the unfortunate distinction of owning this Hellerhole is The Goodman Group of Allentown. For more than ten years, both Goodman and Richland have been searching for a buyer who would clean up the land and the lakes. Eliminate the dangerous conditions, and end the township's (and your) expensive headache. And they finally found one, GenTerra Corporation of Exton.

GenTerra proposed to clean up the entire 26-acre site, demolish the old ruins, and landscape everything. They offered Richland the land at one end of the lake for recreational use, and hoped to construct small two-story condominium buildings at the other end. Everything fit the zoning except for two minor changes. The plan is beautiful, including a new Richland lakeside park. Every resident should be thrilled.

Everyone is not. GenTerra presented the concept to the Planning Commission, and guess who was there to object: the RCA. Oh, they were just fine with the cleanup idea, the landscaping, and the park. It was the condominiums, the development, that they opposed. They want the township to spend the several hundred thousand dollars (of YOUR money) needed to do the cleanup and fixup, and keep the area natural. Natural? There are warzones in Baghdad that have been through less devastation.

And, lest we forget, the township does not even own the property. How many seconds do you think it would take GenTerra and Goodman to be in court if Richland refused their development plans, then tried to buy the land? Of course, details like this don't seem to bother the RCA. They treat all developers like dumpers anyway.

It's time to tell this small band of radicals "Enough already". Don't let them screw this one up for us. We have finally been blessed with someone who will make chicken salad out of chicken feathers, and provide residents with a clean environment and a lakeside park. GenTerra is the answer to the township's prayers, and it may be ten more years before another savior comes along. R epeat C ollectively A men.